“So why not publish everything we know? Sink or swim?”

“Because we can’t prove a damn thing, and right now I have no credibility at all. Let’s accept that Wennerström won this round.”

“OK, I’ll fire you. What are you going to do?”

“I need a break, to be honest. I’m burned right out. I’m going to take some time for myself for a while, some of it in prison. Then we’ll see.”

Berger put her arms around him and pulled his head down to her breasts. She hugged him hard.

“Want some company tonight?” she said.

Blomkvist nodded.

“Good. I’ve already told Greger I’m at your place tonight.”

The street lights reflecting off the corners of the windows were all that lit the room. When Berger fell asleep sometime after 2:00 in the morning, Blomkvist lay awake studying her profile in the dimness. The covers were down around her waist, and he watched her breasts slowly rising and falling. He was relaxed, and the anxious knot in his stomach had eased. She had that effect on him. She always had had. And he knew that he had the same effect on her.

Twenty years, he thought. That’s how long it had been. As far as he was concerned, they could go on sleeping together for another two decades. At least. They had never seriously tried to hide their relationship, even when it led to awkwardness in their dealings with other people.

They had met at a party when they were both in their second year at journalism school. Before they said goodnight they had exchanged telephone numbers. They both knew that they would end up in bed together, and in less than a week they realised this conviction without telling their respective partners.

Blomkvist was sure that it was not the old-fashioned kind of love that leads to a shared home, a shared mortgage, Christmas trees, and children. During the eighties, when they were not bound by other relationships, they had talked of moving in together. He had wanted to, but Erika always backed out at the last minute. It wouldn’t work, she said, they would risk what they had if they fell in love too. Blomkvist had often wondered whether it were possible to be more possessed by desire for any other woman. The fact was that they functioned well together, and they had a connection as addictive as heroin.

Sometimes they were together so often that it felt as though they really were a couple; sometimes weeks and months would go by before they saw each other. But even as alcoholics are drawn to the state liquor store after a stint on the wagon, they always came back to each other.

Inevitably it did not work in the long run. That kind of relationship was almost bound to cause pain. They had both left broken promises and unhappy lovers behind-his own marriage had collapsed because he could not stay away from Erika Berger. He had never lied about his feelings for her to his wife, Monica, but she had thought it would end when they married and their daughter was born. And Berger had almost simultaneously married Greger Beckman. Blomkvist too had thought it would end, and for the first years of his marriage he and Berger had only seen each other professionally. Then they started Millennium and within a few weeks all their good intentions had dissolved, and one late evening they had furious sex on her desk. That led to a troublesome period in which Blomkvist wanted very much to live with his family and see his daughter grow up, but at the same time he was helplessly drawn to Berger. Just as Salander had guessed, it was his continual infidelity that drove his wife to leave.

Strangely enough, Beckman seemed to accept their relationship. Berger had always been open about her feelings for Mikael, and she told her husband as soon as they started having sex again. Maybe it took the soul of an artist to handle such a situation, someone so wrapped up in his own creativity, or possibly just wrapped up in himself, that he did not rebel when his wife slept with another man. She even divided up her holiday so she could spend two weeks with her lover in his summer cabin at Sandhamn. Blomkvist did not think very highly of Beckman, and he had never understood Berger’s love for him. But he was glad that he accepted that she could love two men at the same time.

Blomkvist could not sleep, and at 4:00 he gave up. He went to the kitchen and read the court judgement one more time from beginning to end. Having the document in his hand he had a sense that there had been something almost fateful about the meeting at Arholma. He could never be sure whether Lindberg had told him the details of Wennerström’s swindle simply for the sake of a good story between toasts in the privacy of his boat’s cabin or whether he had really wanted the story to be made public.

He tended to believe the first. But it may have been that Lindberg, for his own personal or business reasons, had wanted to damage Wennerström, and he had seized the opportunity of having a captive journalist on board. Lindberg had been sober enough to insist on Blomkvist treating him as an anonymous source. From that moment Lindberg could say what he liked, because his friend would never be able to disclose his source.

If the meeting at Arholma had been a set-up, then Lindberg could not have played his role better. But the meeting had to have happened by chance.

Lindberg could have had no notion of the extent of Blomkvist’s contempt for people like Wennerström. For all that, after years of study, he was privately convinced that there was not a single bank director or celebrity corporate executive who wasn’t also a cretin.

Blomkvist had never heard of Lisbeth Salander and was happily innocent of her report delivered earlier that day, but had he listened to it he would have nodded in agreement when she spoke of his loathing for bean counters, saying that it was not a manifestation of his left-wing political radicalism. Mikael was not uninterested in politics, but he was extremely sceptical of political “isms.” He had voted only once in a parliamentary election-in 1982-and then he had hesitantly plumped for the Social Democrats, there being nothing in his imagination worse than three years more with Gösta Bohman as finance minister and Thorbjörn Fälldin (or possibly Ola Ullsten) as prime minister. So he had voted for Olof Palme, and got instead the assassination of his prime minister plus the Bofors scandal and Ebbe Carlsson.

His contempt for his fellow financial journalists was based on something that in his opinion was as plain as morality. The equation was simple. A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time. A slum landlord who forces young people to pay through the nose and under the table for a one-room apartment with shared toilet should be hung out to dry.

The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinise company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament. He could not for the life of him understand why so many influential financial reporters treated mediocre financial whelps like rock stars.

These recalcitrant views had time after time brought him into conflict with his peers. Borg, for one, was going to be an enemy for life. His taking on a role of social critic had actually transformed him into a prickly guest on TV sofas-he was always the one invited to comment whenever any CEO was caught with a golden parachute worth billions.

Mikael had no trouble imagining that champagne bottles had been uncorked in some newspapers’ back rooms that evening.